Martin Chambers Ecuador Trust

Tom Oates came back on Thursday and it is great to have him back not least because I don’t have to be doing their extra Mass. I love going back to Tom’s Parish each year to remember old friends but you don’t really feel part of the community and you drift in and drift out. In any case, I have now seen Tom – he came over this morning – but there was no present of US chewing gum! Oh and no mention of the big US event of the week – the election. So I don’t know if that means he’s Republican or just forgot to mention it. And the great news he gave me was regarding the building here of the Medical Centre. I mentioned that we are fighting with the ‘lawyer’ over rights to the land where we want to build. He said that, if the land belongs to the City Council, then the lawyer has no claim over the land and we have legal rights over it. Of course, that was the position we had already come to but it was good to get an independent voice supporting our view. Let’s see if this week’s meeting with the Council brings ‘white smoke’; if so, we can move closer to building start date. Talking of a building start date, I went over to see Colm Hogan’s new school building this week; they are doing the building for a school start-date in April 2009. I had already seen the three classrooms that had been built before I went home to Scotland but now they have started building a convent for some Philippine nuns that are coming to run the school. The convent is large and will house three nuns. It is great to see Colm’s sector expanding too although it is still incredibly poor as well – no running water, sewerage and no electricity. Ten days ago I was asked to go to a Rotary Club function to speak about our work here. The meeting was in a very posh house in a very wealthy part of the city – totally different from Nueva Prosperina. There was genuine interest in what is being done here. As ever there were promises of help. Normally the promises remain as such but these promises produced fruit this Tuesday as I was the proud deliverer of fifty boxes of beans (a thousand tins of beans). Thank you, Jorge Luis – right enough I wouldn’t go near the school Soup Kitchen for a few weeks!!!! The bad news of the week is that Oso had another raging fight with a dog out on the street. I was going over to see Felix about the Church benches. Since it was a nice afternoon I thought I would walk and, since he had been a good boy for over five months, I thought Oso would be calm enough. He was – most of the way – until about five minutes from Felix’s house! He went into a raging fight with a smaller dog. It wasn’t quite a case of putting my fist into the lion’s den but you get the picture. I had to rescue the other dog from Oso – and then make sever apologies. Never again for Oso’s walks around the sector.